Lucy Dacus

Emerging from Richmond’s independent scene in Virginia, Lucy Dacus established herself in the mid-2010s as an American singer-songwriter operating between indie rock and intimate folk. After a handful of local shows, she quickly recorded her debut album No Burden, released in 2016 and later picked up by the Matador label, which also supported the releases of Historian in 2018 and Home Video in 2021. Dacus’s music is marked by often-classical song structures and highly detailed lyrics focused on memory, family, faith and relationships, carried by a deep voice and guitars that alternate between calm textures and denser climaxes. Alongside her solo records, she formed the trio boygenius in 2018 with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, a collaborative indie-rock project that issued an EP the same year and the album the record in 2023, providing another context for her writing. The 2019 mini-album, a collection of covers and songs previously released as singles, presents Dacus in a more overtly conceptual register centered on notable dates in the calendar, while extending her taste for tightly situated narratives and a sparsely arranged sonic aesthetic.